You can’t light a lamp, there’s no oil in the house (poem)

This is a poem by the seventeenth-century monk Yinyuan Longqi. I just saw it in this LionsRoar.com article about a Zen teacher who had a panic attack.

This is an interesting quote: “I practiced in the midst of a pounding heart, with crazy energy running through my body and a strong aversion to these feelings. In the midst of panic, I could feel that it was fundamentally a physical sensation of hyper-arousal and that if I allowed that energy to course, with attention and a minimum of aversion, something interesting happened.”

Photo D8
You can’t light a lamp, there’s no oil in the house (poem)